Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Ruffled Kitchen Towel

My family just made a big move from Virginia to Utah. Back to
what I know and where I grew up. It’s definitely refreshing. But moving to a
new home can be stressful; boxes to unpack, a yard to care for (a totally new
concept for us), an unfamiliar neighborhood to come to know. It takes awhile to
get into your normal groove and feel comfortable. And let’s be honest – I am
hoping that in two years I’ll all of my pictures hung on the wall!

But one thing is for sure--clearing out all of your stuff
and starting anew allows you to look at things from a different perspective and
make a few changes by way of décor. Adding a pop of color here and there can go
a long way in brightening up your room. And why not create a pop of color that’s
not only attractive to look at but also has a function? Here we go with the
Ruffled Kitchen Towel.

And as a side note, not all of my articles are going to
involve sewing or any other complicated skills. I’m more of a simplified glue
gun type of girl. I wanted to keep these “Small and Simple” tutorials just as
they suggest – small and simple.

What you’ll need:

White kitchen towel

6 fabric strips - 3”
x 2x width of towel

Sewing machine with white thread

Needle ­­­­­­­­­

1

1.You’ll want to start off by clean finishing all
of the edges of your fabric strips. If you have a serger, go ahead and use that
for this step. I don’t have a serger, so I just did a zig zag stitch as close
to the edge of the fabric as I could make it.

2 2. Once you have done the clean finish on all of
the edges, go ahead and fold over one of the long sides of each strip and
stitch a straight stitch. This will be the bottom edge of the ruffle and will
show, so you want it to look nicely finished. You can stitch the short sides of
each strip as well.

3 3. Now for the ruffles! There are lots of different
ways to create a ruffle. I recently discovered that you can just gather and sew
the strip into a ruffle as you sew it onto the towel. So simple!

I like the look of the diagonal
ruffle, so I just made sure to pin 4 pins to hold my fabric strip in place so I
could sew the ruffle that way. Just work one ruffle at a time, overlapping the
ruffles by about ¼”so you don’t see the towel underneath.

4 4.Once your ruffles are all sewn on, you’re ready
to embellish. I had an extra large vintage button that happened to match some
of my fabric. I just took the last ruffle and hand sewed it into a circle, then
sewed the button on top.­­­­­